Advances in color science: from retina to behavior.

Abstract

Color has become a premier model system for understanding how information is processed by neural circuits, and for investigating the relationships among genes, neural circuits, and perception. Both the physical stimulus for color and the perceptual output experienced as color are quite well characterized, but the neural mechanisms that underlie the transformation from stimulus to perception are incompletely understood. The past several years have seen important scientific and technical advances that are changing our understanding of these mechanisms. Here, and in the accompanying minisymposium, we review the latest findings and hypotheses regarding color computations in the retina, primary visual cortex, and higher-order visual areas, focusing on non-human primates, a model of human color vision.

Simple hierarchical model of color processing in the macaque cerebral cortex. Regions of cortex shown in gray, which increase in scale along the visual-processing hierarchy from V1 to TE, are implicated in color processing. Adapted from Conway (2009).